Teaching Email / The Message That Gets Read

Write for a phone screen in a noisy kitchen.

Almost nobody reads your message in the conditions you wrote it in.

You compose at a desk, on a wide screen, with the file open and the context fresh. Your reader opens it one handed, on a small screen, standing up, halfway through something else, possibly with a child asking a question. Every structural decision should account for that gap. A dense block of eight lines is a wall on a phone. The same content in three short paragraphs is read. Nothing has been dumbed down; the information has simply been made survivable.

Length is a genuine constraint rather than a stylistic preference. Past a certain point, more words reduce comprehension because the reader abandons the message rather than finishing it. Shorter is not always better, but shorter is almost always better than you think. Cut the throat clearing at the top, the sentence that says you are writing to let them know, and the closing paragraph that repeats what the opening already said.

Assume no context. The reader may not remember the earlier message, may not know the acronym, may not be sure which of their children this concerns, and may not have the timetable in their head the way you do. Naming the student, the subject and the specific piece of work in the first sentence removes an entire round of clarifying replies. Institutional shorthand is an internal dialect, and using it with families is a small act of exclusion even when it is not meant that way.